Alteredq: A WebGL Ninja

Anyone who’s been following the progress of the Three.js 3D JavaScript engine will know of alteredq, as he’s been helping with its development along-side Mr. doob. His latest demo using Three.js really impressed me:

The demo uses Three.js, WebGL and Web Workers; so that pretty much ticks every box for me. The model is from AMD’s MeshMapper which is no longer supported. I can’t say I’ve ever heard / used it before but it’s certainly on my to-do list to try out.

To view the demo see here; be warned though you will need an up to date browser that supports WebGL and Web Workers. Grab a recent version of Chrome and enable WebGL and it should work.

If you really want to push the boundaries you could try the latest Canary Build of Chrome (10.0.605.0 at time of writing) which now has an optimised version of V8, called “Crankshaft”. It uses runtime information to see which code will benefit from the most optimisation and is 2 times quicker in some tests! The Canary Build release channel of Chrome is meant for developers / early adopters who want to try out the latest features. Unlike the dev and beta release channels the Canary Build is installed independently, so it won’t overwrite your current chrome settings.

Bring on the revolution; to paraphrase a well known mobile company: The future’s bright, the future’s WebGL.